csandwlakebaikal

Welcome to the Common Sense and Whiskey Companion:
Lake Baikal.

Here are some photos from Common Sense and Whiskey, chapter 1, Lake Baikal.
You can buy professional prints of most of these photos in the Russia Gallery.
You can buy Common Sense and Whiskey on Amazon.com, or by clicking here.

To get to Lake Baikal, we'd arrived at Irkutsk, one of the larger Siberian cities (something around 500,000 people) and the capital of Irkutsk Oblast. It's some 70 kilometers from Lake Baikal, which feeds the Angara River, as this marker heralds.

One of my favorite photos from Listvyanka is the next one. It was taken in this general store, with a lake view. All those dark objects looking out the front window at the lake are recliners and couches.

September 11, 2001 from the Hotel Buryatia. Due to the time difference it was a little before midnight as we watched the news. This was all overdubbed into Russian, and we were to climb on a train to Mongolia in the morning. We really didn't understand what was happening until we got to Ulan Bataar, cancelled all our arrangements and watched CNN, a day and a half later.